Once upon a time, the altcoin landscape was different. Namecoin was still there but Litecoin was still a few months away from its initial release. On August 21st, 2011 SolidCoin was released. Forum creatures called it promising! It was going to have Features! Some sort of Dark Magic was going to tie its value to the cost of generating new coins! What was actually delivered was lulz, drama, and n00bs being n00bs. "Features" like 3 minute block times, the asymetric SolidCoin difficulty adjustment algorithm, and fixed fees turned into weaknesses in the end. Especially that last one. A large miner named ArtForz leveraged fixed fees into a transaction spam exploit which he had previously warned the SolidCoin developer about into a veritable festival of blockchain bloat. SolidCoin was shut down on September 13th, 2011.

Holy Shit SolidCoin Only Lived 23 Days!

On October 10th, 2011 SolidCoin 2.0 appeared. New features for SolidCoin 2.0 included Centralized Authorities, Trusted Nodes, and Complete Abandonment by Pools which had mined SolidCoin. It also moved over to the Scrypt algorithm for hashing back when people though scrypt protected CPU miners from GPU miners as opposed to the current prevailing opinion that it protects GPU miners from ASIC miners.1 SolidCoin 2.0 is also distributed under a proprietary software license unlike nearly every cryptocoin of note. According to the Bitcoin Wiki SolidCoin 2.0:

a major divide has occured between the shrinking SolidCoin community and the Bitcoin community. Previous supportors of both currencies were forced to migrate to one currency due to bitter accusations, originating from more vocal members of both communities. The reception of SolidCoin is currently very negative, and many people believe it is a scam.

The extent to which people were forced to pick one side or the other is debatable, but in the event people were actually made to pick sides it is clear people who held and continue to hold Bitcoins have been winners, while people holding SolidCoins are not holding anything of value. Here's a particularly lulzy forum nugget2 from CoinHunter.

You're preaching to the choir cosbycoin, even though a lot of what you wrote is wrong it doesn't matter, they'll eat it up. Add a few virgin sacrifices, gangland hits and a meth lab while you're at it, they'll applaud and you'll get the attention you seek. Nothing anyone says is going to stop the steam train which is SC2.0 from coming.I will make one concession though, I shouldn't have been as naive as I was to assume the hackers and trolls were going to be out as quick as they were. The plan was to migrate to what is now SC2.0 over a few weeks with an upgrade path that didn't affect any users. Due to the attacks I had to shut down the network instead to ensure people didn't lose their investments and make it more abrupt but the end result is the same. The #1 chain.SolidCoin will restart with thousands of users, thousands of existing investors and more business support. Anyhow I do find threads like this entertaining and I should thank you all for keeping SolidCoin in the news over here.

Incredible how grand forum declarations and actual reality can be so divergent isn't it? It isn't too unlike what happened with Labcoin. Or any number of scams. I guess "The #1 chain" was what people used to call things before Labcoin invented AMAZING COMPANY.

Needless to say SolidCoin 2.0 was largely a snooze fest. In April of 2012 RealSolid announced SolidCoin3.0 on his forums. SolidCoin 3.0 is what he eventually decided will be renamed MicroCash and depending on which post of his you believe will either grandfather in some of or all of the SolidCoins, I a thread titled "Final word on SolidCoin converstion. Must read." He declares some of the SolidCoins will be converted to MicroCarsh, definitely all of his and those who follow his words slavishly will be converted, but those fuckers who haven't followed things won't have theirs converted because SolidCoin was never intended to be some sort of store of value you could hold without being glued to every one of his rather infrequent declarations.

In July of 2012 things take a turn in the decidedly scammy direction. RealSolid makes a rambling post titled "Future of MicroCash" where he swears he's written tons of code for MicroCash though he hasn't been motivated and he needs money because he has a family. If only people could give him some donations, roughly 250 BTC or so he can finish MicroCash. RealSolid collects the donations and isn't heard from in months. Notice this posting near the end of the thread:

Posted 27 November 2012 - 10:24 PM

notyep, on 06 October 2012 - 11:36 AM, said:

Don't be discouraged, the team is hard at work! Keep in mind that we had trust nodes that went belly up recently (the current chain requires care and feeding and the same team is taking care of that as well). As we all know, the updates will be forthcoming once it is time for all of us to put the MC beta to the test. Keep "patience" alive!

I try to keep a browser window open, pointing to the IRC channel. There are a couple of us who speak up and say something every now and then. But, it's rarely about Microcash.

The most I have seen the past month is I think I saw RS say "Hi" to someone once. Yes, just "Hello". Nothing more. So... the devs still exist who knows what they are doing. They refuse to asnwer our questions.

Is this a sign of a project that is moving forward? Things continued to not happen with SolidCoin/MicroCash until April 2013 when after one of the Vircurex hacks, Vircurex announced that they would stop trading SolidCoins.

Virurex's reason for discontinuing SolidCoin trading was largely that SolidCoin was dead and they were delisting a bunch of coins that were practically dead.3 This must have stuck at something deep within RealSolid and one monthe and one day after Vircurex's announcement, on May 7th 2013 RealSolid unveilled the McxNow exchange. It started with just a few cryptocurrencies listed and not fiat currencies. Among the early cryptocurrencies traded on McxNow were Bitcoin,4 SolidCoin,5, and Devcoin.6

As time went on, in order to differentiate itself McxNow added things to attract or repel new customers which could be described as either features or warning signs depending on how familiar you are with how things have gone historically in Cryptocurrency. Here's the three big ones.

"Interest" payments for merely holding a balance on the site declared to be from "trading fees" and paid out every six hours.

Shares of some sort that nominally pay some higher amount of the revenue derived from trading fees, traded in a small quantity.

A larger release of the shares described in point 2 for trading in something described as but not actually resembling an IPO.

Of course since Mcxnow has opened their IPO and announced their impending closure less than one full calendar month has passed. If you have invested in Mcxnow and haven't done this reading before, I recommend reading the linked material and investigating more so you can appreciate the sort of due diligence it would behoove you to carry out in the future. The problem is when someone fails repeatedly in the same way over and over again as RealSolid does the correct response is not thinking "It is all okay he means well." That sort of reaction is nearly Stockholm syndrome. The correct response is to tell them "STFU, get lost you failure."

At the time of both SolidCoin 2.0 and Litecoin's releases mining scrypt coins with GPUs was both possible and actually done. People who violently insist otherwise merely expose their ignorance on this matter. [↩]

Forum nuggets are not unlike the nuggets found scattered around a rabbit hutch. [↩]

At the time Vircurex was the only major exchange trading large numbers of Altcoins as opposed to a select few like Litecoin. [↩]

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It also moved over to the Scrypt algorithm for hashing back when people though scrypt protected CPU miners from GPU miners as opposed to the current prevailing opinion that it protects GPU miners from ASIC miners

Epic. Not sure if the sarcasm is intentional or not, but epic sarcasm nevertheless.

“The #1 chain” was what people used to call things before Labcoin invented AMAZING COMPANY.

Probably insulting people is the safest route as long as you do it honestly.

It was some pretty big drama earlier this year or late last year for a breif period of time. I'd have to do some serious digging through the alcoin forums to see when exactly this drama flared up. A lot of people were very unhappy with Coblee and Artforz (from back when Artforz contributed to litecoin).

Well, yeah not as many people round and there seems to have been quite a bit of forum people turnover.

Dank is going to take a lot of digging, but Dank is probably possible. I imagine I'll start digging to make one of these posts up when notorious old scumbags resurface and somehow have people giving them legitimacy. Maybe BearShare will get one? Maybe Jeb McCaleb or Joel Katz will? This was a very enjoyable write up so I imagine more of these will be coming.